Thuvia, maid of Mars

About the book

Carthoris of Helium is drawn to Thuvia of Ptarth, but personal desire must contend with her existing obligations and the rival interests surrounding her. When she disappears, suspicion threatens to turn an individual crime into a wider political conflict. The search takes the adventure beyond familiar cities into places where perception and power behave in unexpected ways. Burroughs uses the mysterious inhabitants of Lothar to give the book a distinctive interest in the relation between mental force and physical reality. Pursuit, captivity, and mistaken appearances keep the action moving, while the younger generation extends the world of the earlier John Carter stories. The novel asks its hero to act under circumstances in which both the evidence against him and the apparent nature of his surroundings can mislead.

• Loyalty
• Appearance and reality
• Political rivalry

Why read it

For a Barsoom adventure that combines a diplomatic crisis with unusual experiments in the power of imagination.

English text